Global News and Analysis

Source: Mother Jones

The US economy is rebounding for the nation’s top income earners but not for everyone else, according to a new study from the Economic Policy Institute. The study, published Sunday, finds that chief executives at the country’s 350 biggest firms earned an average of $16.3 million in 2014, marking a 54.3 percent increase since 2009. Meanwhile, compensation for typical workers in the same industries as those CEOs fell 1.7 percent over the same time period.

“Those at the top of the income distribution, including many CEOs, are seeing a strong recovery, while the typical worker is still experiencing the detrimental effects of a stagnant labor market,” the study’s authors, Lawrence Mishel and Alyssa Davis, found. read more

Source: Salon.com

In response to Wednesday’s murder of nine African Americans at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church, President Obama said, “Innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun.”

I’ll admit: When I first read that statement, I thought Obama was talking about the police. Unfair of me perhaps, but it’s not as if we haven’t now been through multiple rounds of high-profile killings of African Americans at the hands of the police. read more

Source: The Atlantic

The flag that Dylann Roof embraced, which many South Carolinians embrace, endorses the violence he committed.

Last night, Dylann Roof walked into a Charleston church, sat for an hour, and then killed nine people. Roof’s crime cannot be divorced from the ideology of white supremacy which long animated his state nor from its potent symbol—the Confederate flag. Visitors to Charleston have long been treated to South Carolina’s attempt to clean its history and depict its secession as something other than a war to guarantee the enslavement of the majority of its residents. This notion is belied by any serious interrogation of the Civil War and the primary documents of its instigators. Yet the Confederate battle flag—the flag of Dylann Roof—still flies on the Capitol grounds in Columbia. read more

Source: Pambazuka

In Africa, women’s rights have been underrated, ignored and trampled upon. The place of the African woman is often regarded as that of being seen but not heard. Too often, culture is used as a justification for the denial of women’s rights. While every community has traditions which it holds dear, some customs have proven to be quite detrimental to women. For instance, female genital mutilation (FGM), wife beating, early marriages, denial of property rights and inheritance, to mention a few. read more

Source: The Nation

The fall of Mosul to the so-called Islamic State group (called in Arabic Daesh) on June 10, 2014, startled the world. The spectacle of thousands of Iraqi army troops fleeing the city in the face of black-masked suicide bombers and the Muslim equivalent of biker gangs riveted attention on Iraq again, a country that had receded from the Atlantic world’s consciousness after the US withdrawal late in 2011. A few weeks later, the Daesh leader, who goes by the nom de guerre of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared a caliphate, putting himself forward as a successor of Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II and his successor Sultan Mehmet V, who had also asserted themselves vicars of the Prophet before the Ottoman state collapsed in the maelstrom of World War I and a militantly secular modern Turkish republic abolished the caliphate by act of parliament in 1924. A frisson of terror went through Iraqis at the prospect that the movement might take Baghdad (now largely Shiite) and Erbil (the capital of Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government). read more

Source: Truthout

Donald Rumsfeld is this generation’s Robert McNamara.

Over 12 years after overseeing and helping to design the 2003 invasion of Iraq – the former secretary of defense is now re-writing his own role in the invasion.

In an interview with The Times of London, Rumsfeld called the Bush administration’s approach to Iraq “unrealistic.”

He was referring specifically to the Bush administration’s goal of toppling a dictatorship and building a model democracy in the Middle East – and he said, read more